500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(7)

Kim-Ange had her hands up.

“I know,” she said, her face a mask of sadness. She was holding up a bottle of some mysterious plum-colored substance. That was the good thing and bad thing about nurses’ homes: word got around.

“It was Ezra’s . . .”

“I know that too.” Kim-Ange swallowed. “He’s been seeing Yazzie.”

“Ah,” said Lissa, even in her exhaustion and misery registering that Ezra had been spreading himself around the exact same place she actually lived.

She felt utterly hollow inside.

Kim-Ange waved the bottle. “Come try this.”

Ever since she’d found an old cocktail cabinet in a dumpster that she’d hoicked home single-handedly, Kim-Ange had been on a mission to invent something new, which meant experimenting with a lot of things that were disgusting. Lissa didn’t care that evening, though.

“So, how bad are you feeling about it?” said Kim-Ange, eyeing her shrewdly. “Tracksuit bottoms bad? I mean, you know other people can see you.”

Kim-Ange had extremely high sartorial standards. She herself was wearing a long pink-and-red nightdress, matching robe, marabou slippers, and a full face of makeup.

“Yes,” said Lissa. “It was a hit-and-run. Possibly deliberate. Fifteen years old.”

“It barely made the news,” said Kim-Ange.

Lissa sighed. “Give me the purple elixir of joy and/or misery then,” she said, holding out her mug, and Kim-Ange filled it up. “Oh my God, that’s revolting,” Lissa choked out, collapsing onto her bed. Then she took another sip. “Still bad.”

There was a pause and she tried again.

“Okay, now it’s not so bad.”

“There we are,” said Kim-Ange, pleased. “A three-sipper. One of my best yet!” She started absent-mindedly folding Lissa’s clothes.

“They’re going to call me in too,” said Lissa after a while. “Disciplinary, I think. I didn’t get out of the way of the doctors. I messed up with the transplant protocol.”

“You stopped a transplant?!”

“No, I made one happen.”

“Oh, that is terrible.” Kim-Ange snorted. “And don’t tell me, did you have a baby doctor who didn’t know his arse from his elbow and couldn’t tap a vein in either of them?”

“No, I crossed the line,” said Lissa.

“Thank God there’s such a plethora of highly trained paramedical staff they could fill your job from,” said Kim-Ange, looking mischievous.

Lissa half smiled. “How short are they at the moment?”

“Four grade eights,” said Kim-Ange. “Haha, they’ll never get rid of you. I mean, seriously. What else did you do? Did you have full sex in the ambulance?”

“Kim-Ange!”

“I’ll take that as a maybe.”

“No!”

“Did you steal the car afterward?”

Lissa bit her lip. “Stop it.”

“No, seriously, I am trying to work out ways they’d actually let you go. Did you make the ambulance stop at the KFC drive-through on the way to the hospital?”

“No.”

“There you go then. It’ll be a telling-off.”

“I hate those too.”

Kim-Ange rolled her eyes. “That’s right, terrifying NHS management sitting on their fat arses ticking boxes all day. They are pretty tough and scary, right enough. I heard they don’t even cry when they get a paper cut.”

“Tell me about your day,” said Lissa, changing the subject. “Hang on, didn’t you have a date tonight?”

Kim-Ange approached Tinder with more or less as much tenacity as her job in cardiology. “Hmm,” she said.

“Oh no!” Lissa scrolled down her phone. “But look at you on Insta! You look amazing!”

“I do,” said Kim-Ange.

Lissa looked at her, then back at the picture, then up at Kim-Ange again. “Stop doing that!”

“What?” said Kim-Ange innocently.

“Giving yourself a waist. It looks really weird.”

“Beautiful weird?”

“I’m taking FaceTune off your phone. You have gone too far. You look like a shark has bitten a chunk out of you.”

“Piss off!”

“You’re beautiful as you are,” said Lissa. “So, don’t tell me. He was a shark-bite fetishist and then you turned up without a chunk out of you?”

“No.” Kim-Ange sighed. “He just kept going on and on about kimchi.”

“Oh, you’re kidding,” said Lissa. “Did you tell him you’re from Margate?”

“Yup. That’s when he started telling me I really ought to get to know my own culture.”

Lissa laughed and rolled over on the bed, stuffing her face into her pillow. “No! Know-your-culture bro strikes again! Nooo!!”

Kim-Ange checked her waist in the mirror and breathed in, quite hard.

“What else did he say?” said Lissa from behind the pillow.

“Oh! He went to Cambodia on his gap year.”

“So?”

“So! Obviously I would want to hear all about that!”

Lissa screwed up her face, then pulled out her phone. “Oh well. Let’s see what everyone else is up to.”